Posts Tagged ‘The Indie Stone’

Mid-way through Rezzed, I decided that somebody must have cloned Dean Hall. The DayZ creator was everywhere. One minute he was talking about the most frightening moment of his life – hanging off the side of Everest, I hear – and the next he was playing games on the showfloor. If he wasn’t admiring Maia with an excited twinkle in his eye, he was telling interested parties about how much he digs Project Zomboid. The man loves games and since he has so many interesting things to say about them, we should be thankful that he enjoys talking about them quite as much as he does. One panel involved The Indie Stone folk and Hall talking about zombies. They offer a defence of the oft-maligned enemy and it’s often compelling. Behold.

What are you doing this weekend? I’ll be doing what I always do: travelling to Wales to watch a roller derby match, and playing a multiplayer survival game in a world populated by zombies. No, for once the latter doesn’t mean DayZ, but Project Zomboid. The long-in-alpha isometric RPG recently released a new beta-for-the-alpha, which adds multiplayer and is downloadable via Steam.Read the rest of this entry »

Graham: I tried playing Rust and didn’t really click with it. It feels earlier even than DayZ.John: Another interesting sounding game ruined by the presence of awful other people.Graham: Haha! Do you play Project Zomboid at all? It’s singleplayer.John W: I haven’t for a very long time.Adam S: I played Zomboid a couple of weeks ago – still feels too empty for my liking. I end up surviving for half a day and then running around attracting as many zombies as possible just to make something happen.

If you’ve ever invested time in a level editor, there’s a good chance you’ve started looking around your environment and considered how you might re-create it in a game. If you’ve ever invested time in a piece of zombie fiction, there’s a good chance you’ve started looking around your environment and considered how you might survive an attack by the walking dead. The Project Zomboid Map Editor lets you explore both fascinations by enabling you to create your own home, office, or other environment, and port it into the alpha-developed isometric zombie survival RPG.Read the rest of this entry »

That’s it. That’s the news. It was in the title. I’m always a little wary, though, of posting things like this, which are just straight-up, matter-of-fact pieces of information about a thing you can now buy in a new place. So to prove that I’m a hard-hitting journalist, I reached out to Will Porter over the weekend to ask him about the game’s launch into Early Access.Read the rest of this entry »

Everything has a horde mode. Just the other day I accidentally set my microwave to horde mode, and when I returned from a pre-dinner poo I was overwhelmed by burritos. They were deliciously angry. I tried to phone the police for help, but in the stramash I accidentally switched my phone to horde mode as well. There were burritos and phones everywhere. I’ve sealed the kitchen up, but the intoxicating aroma of pico de gallo wafting through my house is driving me mad, and when someone texts me all the phones go off. In other news, did you know that isometric zombie survival game Project Zomboid has just updated with a “Last Stand” mode? It puts you in a house in the woods against all the zombies. Like I said: everything has a horde mode.Read the rest of this entry »

The Project Zomboid session at Rezzed was right at the beginning of the first day and yet it still managed to be extremely busy. Despite the (approximately) seven million people in attendance, if there’s even the slightest chance that one person reading this didn’t see the people of The Indie Stone talking about ‘How (not) to make a game’, I suggest you do so now. With Will Porter guiding the journey from the safety of a podium, the team talk about the origins of the game, copying Notch, living on beans and bread, and a series of extremely unfortunate events. There’s plenty of humour but also memories of robbery, death and the internet being a bastard. Then, for good measure, a trailer for the next version of the game.

Project Zomboid developers The Indie Stone aren’t have-and-have-not types. They’re more egalitarian in their views, and have just released a newly updated public version of the Project Zomboid alpha for everyone. This is actually a test-build of the public build that’s being worked on, with a full, working release incoming in ‘a week or so’ – that’ll have story-based content reinstated and a working launcher. As such this is a somewhat crippled version of the game, as the lengthy list of troubles you can expect demonstrates, but they’re releasing it in the knowledge that a) you know this to be the case, and b) zombies!Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a while since we looked in on Project Zomboid, the disaster-prone survival RPG that, fingers crossed, now hopefully seems to be back on an even keel. During their time hiding and rebuilding, devs The Indie Stone have given the game “a radical engine overhaul,” a new AI system and assorted extra bits. The latest new feature on show is carpentry, which sounds like a minor, dull thing on paper, but in practice you can see just how crucial erecting ruddy great pieces of wood all over the place is to defending yourself against hungry deadheads. Also, there’s a new lighting system on the cards. Cos light is also quite handy for the whole not being dead thing. Unless you’re an earthworm, in which case a lack of light is probably more useful.Read the rest of this entry »

We already mentioned this briefly in The Sunday Papers, but really it deserves its own post – both because of how flat-out tragic the situation is, and because a vocal subset of the online response to it has been repellent. To summarise: The Indie Stone, developers of Project Zomboid (as yet unreleased, but playable builds are offered to anyone who pre-orders) suffered a break-in over the weekend, with the thief making off with two of their laptops. One of these laptops contained the current and in-development code for the game and future updates. The other laptop contained the only backups of the latest code.

Needless to say, the team – just four guys making them game themselves, and funding it solely via pre-order money – are distraught, apologetic and enormously self-recriminatory. There’s a statement from PZ’s writer Will Porter here, but the long and short of it is that, while the game will continue, clearly it’s going to delay the next update. The finished game has never been given a release date, but the community has come to expect a regular trickle of new builds and features. The current build is still online and running however, and I’m assured the game’s wider integrity is not compromised. All will be well again very soon.Read the rest of this entry »

The Indie Stone have announced that the first update for Project Zomboid is now available for download. And that’s not all! They’ve also answered some questions regarding Steam availability and the frequency and girth of future updates. If you’ve already pre-purchased the game and have access to the in development version, the update is available now. The free demo, however, will not be updated so if you want to see the changes in action, it’s time to hand over the clams. Fortunately, that just got easier because the game is now available through Desura. Not Steam though. Not yet.

Here’s a spot of good news for the world’s unluckiest indie developer, The Indie Stone: It’s looking as though Project Zomboid – their really very good zombie survival game – may be coming to Steam. Using the same technology that brought the news that TF2 was going free, keen eyes on our forum have spotted the Magical Box Thing that says what’s being added soon listing Project Zomboid as a retail product. Which is fabbo, because it deserves to be played, and those poor bastards deserve some luck. So just give your best guesses as to how this will go spectacularly wrong. (Cheers to Will and SilverSilence.)

And thus continued the saga of sadness known as poor Project Zomboid. Over the weekend, developer The Indie Stone removed the game from their website after they discovered that pirates had developed a version that can update itself. This means trouble. Here are some words that they said in a blog post:

“These ‘auto updating’ versions of the game could screw us completely. We have a cloud based distribution model, where the files are copied all over the world and are served to players on request, which means we are charged money for people downloading the game.”